Perhaps the most common investment theme among America's top advisors is their love of blue-chip stocks that pay hefty dividends. It's easy to see why. While 10-year Treasury bonds are paying less than 2%, advisors can snap up shares of General Electric, with a dividend yield of 3.5%, Merck, paying 4.3%, or AT&T, at 5.9%. And if the stock market moves up, there's the added kicker of capital gains.

Count top advisor Edwin Rodriguez Jr. of New Orleans among the believers. "You have to go where the income is coming from," he says. "I sound like a broken record, but it's high-quality dividend-paying stocks."

Shawn Fowler of Denver is another big fan. "Ninety-five percent of everything we buy pays us in some form of dividends or interest," he says. "We're paid while we wait, and we buy quality." Some advisors are adding to the mix with carefully chosen municipal bonds, which can deliver tax-equivalent yields of 4.4% a year, and Master Limited Partnerships, some with yields as high as 9%.

MLPs, which are publicly traded limited partnerships that operate in the energy industry and other natural-resource fields, combine the tax advantages of partnerships with the liquidity of stocks. Most of them pay out the majority of their cash flows as dividends.

"When you've seen such a massive decline in income in fixed-income portfolios, anything that can supplement income has become relatively more appealing," says Mike Ryan, chief investment strategist for UBS Wealth Management.

One way or another, the 1,000 advisors on our annual list have managed to thrive in these tricky conditions. The exclusive listing shows the leading advisors in each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. You will also find stories about the No. 1 advisors in each state and D.C.

Fully 20 of those 51 are new to the top spots, such as California's Steve Lockshin, of Convergent Wealth Advisors, Florida's Ami Forte, of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, and Connecticut's John Rafal, of Essex Financial Services.

The listing is based on assets under management, revenue the advisors generate for their firms and the quality of their practices. Investment performance isn't explicitly a criterion, because the advisors' clients differ widely in their goals, but most of the advisors have been attracting lots of new business through referrals, a clear sign of customer satisfaction.

This is the largest of several advisor listings that Barron's compiles each year. In it, the number of advisors we rank for each state is based on the size of the state. By contrast, our widely followed Top 100 listing, out in April, disregards state boundaries.

THE TYPICAL PROFILE of a Top 1,000 advisor hasn't changed much since last year's ranking. They average 52 years old, have been in the investment business for 25 years and have been with their current firm for 19 years. Their typical account size is $11 million, representing almost half the net worth of the typical client. On average, the Top 1,000 advisors require an account to have a minimum of $3 million, though that varies greatly from state to state and advisor to advisor.

The Top 1,000 advisors usually work in a team, averaging about eight people, two of whom share ownership of the business.

Since the crash of 2008, assets have migrated to the best advisors. The Top 1,000's assets under management increased 10% last year, and they have seen their assets grow an average of 14% in each of the past five years. Some of that is due to investment gains, and some is due to attracting new accounts and fresh money from existing clients.

Many top advisors this year are optimistic about corporate America. Historically high cash levels and low debt, combined with a continued recovery, bode well for U.S. stocks, says Sandra Dalton of UBS, a top advisor in Boise, Idaho.

"I believe we're in the beginning of the start of a long-term bull market," says Dalton. "Investors will be surprised, but they really will get growth."

And now, before investors have caught on, is the time to find great values, argues Colorado's Fowler, an advisor at Morgan Stanley. Many solid companies are trading at just 60% to 65% of their long-term averages, he says.

Especially blunt is John Moore, who runs his own shop in Albuquerque, N.M. Based purely on the numbers, "it's time to back up the truck and load it up with stocks," he says.

THE FACT THAT SO MANY GOOD STOCKS are in the sale bin these days reflects investors' continued wariness of equities in general, and persuading them to take worthwhile risks has been one of advisors' main challenges.

It's taken some coaxing to get more conservative clients off the sidelines, says Wells Fargo Advisors' Steven Hefter, of Deerfield, Ill. "If it were up to them, they'd be in T-bills."

Clients' wariness isn't just a legacy of the 2008 crash: These days, they're bombarded with news about Europe's debt crisis, the U.S. deficit and global volatility.

"With this onslaught of bad news, we all ought to be under the couch in a fetal position," says John Rafal, in Essex, Conn. "But the world is not coming to an end, and there are investments that are doing well."